God will wipe away our tears: but not before death has staked its claim.

When I was in the seminary, one of our instructors said that if we hadn't come to terms with our own mortality and the meaning of death, we should consider some other line of work. What he meant was that much of what you do as a priest will involve you at a very personal level with death and the last stages of life, and with the grief of those who have loved (or have failed to love) the dying person.

I have thought of this often during the recent discussions of physician-assisted suicide. I oppose it, but I understand the feelings behind euthanasia, as misguided as they are. In part they involve compassion of a sort. But much more deeply, they involve fear.

The saddest thing I have to do as a pastor is visit nursing homes. The best of them are grim, unsettling places. The worst are circles in Dante's hell. Once I went to see an old woman. Her niece was with me. When we walked into her room, the old woman burst into tears. Although she is in her nineties and is physically infirm, her mind is good. She shares a floor with patients who suffer from extreme dementia, and their screams, their constantly repeated sentences and pleas, are torture for her.

Another parishioner, at another home, wept because he no longer lived with his family. He wanted to die, in part because of his loneliness for his living family, but also because he missed his dead relatives and believed he would be with them again after death. A few months later his mind had faded quite a bit; he lost track of sentences just begun. One day he told us, "I'm going to take a train ride soon." We asked what train that was, and he said, "The one my father rode." He died a few days later.

Part of the sadness we feel in such places is that we are confronted with a truth we usually manage to evade: each one of us is mortal, and for a great many of us death will be preceded by pain. The story of the Buddha tells us that his father, wanting to keep him in the palace, hid all distressing sights from his son. But when the Buddha encountered an ill man, a sick man, and a corpse, this confrontation with unavoidable suffering led him on his search for enlightenment.

We, however, send for Doctor Kevorkian. Euthanasia is, after all, a reasonable secular response to something truly terrible. But where this reason crumbles is in the way it responds instantly to fear. It is not only compassion for the sufferer that moves us to euthanasia. It is also our not being able to bear watching it. It hurts us to see someone suffer, in part because we know that we could suffer as well, and someday might. We want to end what is unavoidable and hard to watch.

This presupposes the meaninglessness of suffering. And it is easy to see why. Our culture sentimentalizes death. "Death is just a part of life." And how - the scariest part of all. But strictly speaking, this isn't true. Dying, which is often as bad as it seems to be, is part of life; death cancels life. But how to look for meaning in dying, in a suffering which can be all-consuming?

The point is that the difference between death and dying is infinite. The suffering involved in dying is what we must focus on, as a culture and as Christians. One point that must be stressed and is, thank God, increasingly appreciated is that it is not wrong to allow people to die. Another is that pain control is not currently as well understood as it should be by many people involved in the care of the dying. But this is still not the most important question: How do we find meaning here?

The terror of dying has to do with leaving everything we have known and everyone we love. We have no idea what awaits us. This is true of no other human reality. Jesus was "greatly distressed and troubled" at Gethsemane. Love leads us to want the other to be, and here we are not. It seems to cancel everything that we sense in a primordial way should be. Instead of reconciling us to this, Christianity agrees with that primordial sense. The world should not be a place of suffering and death; yet it is: "Death spread to all because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). We can distract ourselves from the tragedy of our condition, which is the agenda of our entire culture; or we can try to detach ourselves from it philosophically. But instead of detaching us from the suffering that contradicts our sense of the way the world should be, Christianity shows us that the love which calls us into being was shown most completely as flesh nailed to wood. The Resurrection begins here.

There is a wonderful passage in the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great:

Descending through the Cross into hell - that he might fill all things with himself - he loosed the pangs of death. He arose on the third day, having made for all flesh a path to the resurrection from the dead, since it was not possible for the author of life to be a victim of corruption. So he became the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep, the first-born of the dead....

The cross, all suffering, is as horrible as it seems. But it is not evaded, by any of us. Even the most peaceful death takes someone beloved away from us. Our attempts to find meaning in suffering are not attempts to make suffering all right - it isn't - or meaningful in a way that serves us. It can't; it can only diminish and hurt us. To the extent that we see this as all, we have given the final victory to sin. But we have been promised that this slow cancellation is not the end or the point. We could not have learned without the revelation of Christ the full sadness of our condition, the depth of God's love, or the glory that has been promised.